designed to sate franchise fans’ appetite for turn-based strategy in two-minute bursts while simultaneously introducing the series to new audiences.

Then the summer brought Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia for Nintendo 3DS, a compelling remake of the quarter century-old second game in the series. It delivered the challenging, permadeath-infused combat and epic fantasy storytelling that Fire Emblem’s hard core followers crave.

And now with the fall comes Fire Emblem Warriors for Switch, a hack and slash adventure co-developed by Omega Force, the folks who originated and continue to steward the pseudo-historical Dynasty Warriors games, in which famous Chinese figures carve their way through legions of enemies in spectacular fashion.

At first glance a genre focused on frenetic combat in which heroes can kill dozens of enemies with just a few blows and eliminate literally thousands of foes in each battle might seem a strange fit for a series better known for its slow-paced, turn-based, one-on-one combat. But Fire Emblem shares some of the key ingredients of a Warriors-style game, including a huge roster of recognizable and beloved characters, a focus on medieval-style combat with melee weapons, bows, and just a bit of magic, and narratives revolving around heroes leading armies to save kingdoms.

Fire Emblem Warriors begins as many Fire Emblem games do, with a benevolent royal family tossed from power, its young heirs left to roam the country gathering forces to fight back. It also takes a page from the Fire Emblem Heroes app in that many of the forces drawn to help wage war actually hail from other times and worlds in the Fire Emblem universe, including series favourites like Chrom, Lucina, Frederick, Ryoma, and Camilla. There’s a bit more to the story, but not much. Because the vast majority of your time is spent engaged in battle.

If you’ve not played a Warriors-style game before, you’ll be in for a bit of a shock at how powerful your heroes are. Your very first swing of a sword or lance will cause scores of enemies to rise into the air, and each successive blow will make them soar higher until they all fall to the ground quite dead. And these enemies will be instantly replaced by hundreds more.

It’s a strangely graceful fracas in which entire armies exist simply to (slightly) slow your hero’s progress from one objective to the next within labyrinthine maps. The only serious contest lay in the bosses you fight – enemy captains and generals – who are just as powerful as you are. Even then, though, the strategy is usually reduced to figuring out where your foe sits on Fire Emblem’s classic weapons triangle (swords beat axes, axes beat lances, lances beat swords) and choosing an appropriately equipped hero to take care of business. Because in each battle you’re granted control of not just one or even two of these godly warriors, but several, and you can switch between them instantly at the tap of a button.

Perhaps unexpectedly, given the effort put into combat spectacle, the real challenge isn’t the button mashing melee brawls, but instead how you manage the battlefield. Your allies constantly bark out status updates, informing you of new and changing objectives, alerting you when reinforcements arrive, and throwing out suggestions on how to gain access to blocked areas. You’ll often have limited time in which to complete certain goals, so you’ll need to command your allies to various positions while you continue to work on whatever task you’ve currently set for yourself. But since heroes aren’t very capable when fighting on their own – one of the game’s more serious flaws – you’ll need to keep any eye on the mini-map so that you can switch to them when they arrive at their destinations and handle things yourself.

If you’re a Fire Emblem fan who’s starting to think all this real-time tumult might not be your cup of tea, that’s fair. The folks who’ll enjoy Fire Emblem Warriors the most are those who sit in the intersecting area in the venn diagram that depicts the audiences of Fire Emblem and Warriors-style games, and I suspect that the majority of those two circles don’t overlap. But there is a chance that it could draw in a more few players from the Fire Emblem camp. Here’s why.

Omega Force and Team Ninja have done a surprisingly good job of translating some of Fire Emblem’s compelling character growth and management features into the Warriors universe. Our heroes level up a set of familiar attributes as they gain experience, they can eventually – and quite gratifyingly – change classes with the help of a rare Master Seal for a huge jump in power, and pairs of heroes can team up to support and grow their bond with each other on the battlefield. What’s more, if you choose to play in “classic” mode then fallen heroes won’t automatically be deployable in future battles – a slightly softer version of the franchise’s long cherished permadeath feature.

In other words, Fire Emblem Warriors is more than just a Warriors game with Fire Emblem personalities in place of classic Chinese historical figures. It manages to retain a distinct Fire Emblem flavour despite dishing out a style of action that is arguably the polar opposite of what Fire Emblem fans expect.

That might not be enough to convince fans of either series that this crossover experiment is worth $80, but speaking as a guy who has played and enjoyed Fire Emblem games for decades I can say I had a bit more fun with it than I’d expected. Battles aren’t as cerebrally satisfying as those in a traditional Fire Emblem game, but Fire Emblem Warriors does demand a bit of battlefield strategy. Plus, I’ll take any opportunity to reunite with and fret over the safety of some of my favourite Fire Emblem heroes. And I doubt I’m alone.

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